Religion in Gabriel Garcis Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

In "One Hundred Years of Solitude", one largely recognizable theme that Gabriel García Márquez presents is the role of religion. García Márquez repeatedly ridicules the extreme value Latin American culture has placed in organized religion. He also depicts the negative effects the outside religion, and technology, had on Latin American traditional culture.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the character Fernanda del Carpio embodies the rigidity of Catholicism, the major religion of Latin America. It is this outsider, a zealous Catholic, who brings the Buendía homestead under an iron-fist rule with strict religious practices. However, García Márquez expresses his animosity with organized religion when he first introduces Fernanda, illustrating her arrival, "The carnival had reached its highest level of madness ... when on the swamp road a parade of several people appeared carrying in a gilded litter the most fascinating woman that imagination could conceive" (217). The manner in which Fernanda is brought in, and idolized, elevated on a golden couch amongst the heathenish carnival reflects García Márquez's views on the invasion of Christianity into Latin America. Fernanda's rigid rule and forced participation echoes the destruction of the traditional cultural beliefs. The hypocrisy in the event of the most strictly religious character being named the queen of a barbaric, out-of-control carnival ridicules organized religion.

García Márquez frequently uses miracles in One Hundred Years of Solitude to further express the hypocrisy he finds with religion and social constructs of Latin America. Throughout the text, seemingly miraculous happenings occur that to the people of Macondo are normal and accepted, and yet the Buendías find modern technological discoveries confusing. García Márquez uses the arrival of the telephone as a humorous miracle, depicting:

It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise ... to such an extreme that no...

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Religion in OneHundredYears of Solitude and The Lost Steps
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“Incest refers to inappropriate sexual activity between individuals who are considered to be too closely related socially or genetically. It is a social and cultural term, in other words, within any culture, any given sexual activity can in principle be categorized as either incestuous or non-incestuous (Webster 1).”
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Various magical ideas ranging from flying carpets to floating up into the heavens are inputted into the daily lives of the Buendías as well as those who they interact with in Gabriel García Márquez’s book OneHundredYears of Solitude. It is not unusual to encounter the supernatural in this novel. Neither is it uncommon to find people, and even animals losing their sanity over what to us may seem like something not worthy of even bothering about. However, Macondo, along with the Buendías, does not lose its sense of reality in such a way that the town and its people retain their earthiness despite all of the unrealistic happenings in the story.
García Márquez starts off his novel with a flashback of the time when the town of Macondo was still young. Gypsies, who are generally considered to be a magical people, annually return to this town to show its few citizens their inventions. They bring in items such as metal ingots that attract metallic items unseen for a period of time. Unheard of to the very first citizens of the town of Macondo, it was definitely and invention that did not cease, but instead increased their curiosity. Nowadays, however, it is known that these two metal ingots were magnets. Still in the very first chapter of OneHundredYears of Solitude, a boy by the name of Aureliano is born to Úrsula...

...Continues the cycle
Pushes Meme into her solitude
Causes her to disregard everything even her father
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Breaking down the formality of the town
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Hint: this is why they have a downfall
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...Believed by many to be one of the world's greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American "Boom." Affectionately known as "Gabo" to millions of readers, he first won international fame with his masterpiece, OneHundredYears of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature.
Whether writing short stories, epic novels, or nonfiction, Gabo is above all a brilliant storyteller, and his writing is a tribute to both the power of the imagination and the mysteries of the human heart. In Gabo's world, where flowers rain from the sky and dictators sell the very ocean, reality is subject to emotional truths as well as physical boundaries. It is a world of great beauty and great cruelty; a world where love brings both redemption and enslavement; and a world where the lines between objective reality and dreams are hopelessly blurred. It is a world very much like our own.
On Translation and García Márquez  A speech delivered by Edith Grossman at the 2003 PEN Tribute to García Márquez.
Serenade  García Márquez tells the story of his parents' courtship and marriage in the New Yorker.
The Power of García Márquez  A New Yorker article from September 1999.
Shipwrecked  García Márquez' New York Times op-ed piece on Elián González.
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...Cien Anos de Soledad Style in Gabriel Garcia Marquez'sOneHundredYears of Solitude is closely linked to myth. Marquez chooses magic realism over the literal, thereby placing the novel's emphasis on the surreal. To complement this style, time in OneHundredYears of Solitude is also mythical, simultaneously incorporating circular and linear structure (McMurray 76).
Most novels are structured linearly. Events occur chronologically, and one can map the novel's exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. OneHundredYears of Solitude is also linear in its broad outlines (Bell-Villida 98). The plot of the novel is simple: Jose Arcadio Buendia marries his cousin Ursula, they found Macondo, the family grows, declines, and is eventually blown off the face of the earth by a hurricane. There is a beginning, and time moves the story to a total, apocalyptic conclusion (117).
Within this linear background, the structure of OneHundredYears of Solitude is circular (McMurray 77). Events throughout the entire novel repeat themselves in cycles. The names Aureliano and Jose Arcadio are repeated in each generation, resulting in a total of five Jose Arcadios and 22 Aurelianos. The men's personalities...